Re: Rooftop.
He shrugged his shoulders, a bit sheepish. "It's funny you should say that," he said. "I spoke with Wren, and she wants you to move in with her. It would be safer, that way. But if you don't wish to, I understand." He stood at last. "I was hoping you could tell me where he's staying, though," he said. It was couched in nothing, and he didn't attempt to be coy. He wanted the information, but he also wanted to see how she'd respond, a barometer for what had changed.
He watched her fight through and trail off. "Then you what?" he asked. Alexander contacting her had been expected, but him revealing the falsity of his threats had not. "I'm treating them as if they might be real until they prove otherwise," he said. "But there is no doubt that he said them to control you."
Wake up. What a strange way of putting it. "You're welcome. You do seem very different. More than just better. I just can't put my finger on what it is, exactly." Not altogether true. He knew exactly what had changed, but it was all too drastic, unless the shyness had been an act. But no, that was doubtful.
When she pressed her fingers over his good eye, he looked back at her. The bad one had never been able to focus perfectly again after he came out of the coma, but he could see out of it, which was more than had been expected. "Not many would say that," he said, smiling a little still, wry at the assessment. He had a healthy amount of self-knowledge, and he wasn't self-conscious. He was self-aware, though. People expected things of a man with a scarred face, and tended not to meet his eyes when they were giving him change, or sometimes at all. It unnerved them, and people didn't like to acknowledge things that made ripples in their world, made them remember there was violence in it, and bad people. Many assumed he was a veteran of some kind, and some made jokes, asked him how bad the other guy had it. But he kept that story to himself. The scar was the badge that showed he had survived, for better or worse, and marked the person he'd promised himself would be the last one he fail, like a notch on a prison wall. It was his history, the one he kept close to his heart, and the two rings that hung from a chain next to it, under his shirt. "You're a beautiful woman," he said, without compunction or leering, an almost detached statement of fact. "Who is dressed a little more scandalously than I expected, this evening."